Forum rules
There are no such things as "stupid" questions. However if you think your question is a bit stupid, then this is the right place for you to post it. Please stick to easy to-the-point questions that you feel people can answer fast. For long and complicated questions prefer the other forums within the support section.Before you post please read how to get help

I've been using linux for a while now and just today moved my main desktop across from Ubuntu to LMDE. I was attracted b the rolling release and the 'not being Ubuntu' ness of it and in general I'm very very pleased so far but I am having a few frustrating issues.

1. There is a very pervasive 'stutter' in everything from the cursor movement, to the window movement to video play that goes away when I end conky, so is obviously being caused by the update cycle on that.

2. My nvidia gpu is stuck on 'high performance' mode and will not automatically clock down to idle.

3. The compiz wobbly windows plugin is making my windows snap to edges of the screen and I can't stop it, this definitely isn't being caused by the 'window snap' plugin.

I have of course googles and searched the forums for answers and I'm still struggling with these three, I would certainly appreciate any help. What follows are my system specs and a paste of my .conkyrc. I hate, hate, hate it on the Ubuntu forums when people say 'this is rubbish, windows doesn't have these problems' but please bear in mind that I installed LMDE on this system straight over an Ubuntu install (keeping /home, which is on a separate HDD) and none of these issues occurred in Ubuntu and so all are fixable.

I tried looking into #3 (not using either Conky or Nvidia at this machine, but it's possible the performance-mode is due to your using Compiz), but I couldn't find anything. Have you tried to simply disabling the wobbly windows plug-in in CompizConfig?

I have managed to get stop conky from interfering by changing 'own_window_type' to normal. It's not ideal as conky now looks sunken into the desktop a little but it'll do. No idea what I did to wobbly windows but that's now gone too.

So, I'm left with a Nvidia GPU that won't slow down. Attached is a screenshot of nividia-settings. As you can see, 'preferred mode' is set to adaptive, whereas 'performance mode' reads full performance. I wonder if the GPU is secretly doing something? Compiz maybe? Killing it doesn't slow it down.

In other news, how do I get compiz to be the default window manager? In Ubuntu I had a script which ran at startup that contained:

Compiz on startup: Have you tried adding a script starting compiz in Startup Applications? (From the Control Center, or Settings menu.) LMDE is... just like that. However, I'm running KDE too, and don't want Compiz to usurp KWin, so I've made a sort of compromise: stick the command 'compiz --replace' in an empty file, make a launcher pointing to it and put that on the Gnome panel. Also adding a shortcut for restoring Metacity, for rainy days. Manual compositing-toggle, yo...

Nvidia: ... *Shrug* Don't know anything about that. But is there a difference when you're running Compiz and when you're running Metacity? And maybe the card needs some time to cool down, as well?